FRUGAL TRAVELER; New York's Bargain Hotels, With Help From the Web

I SPENT six weeks this spring bottom-fishing for affordable hotel rooms in Manhattan, a project I approached with trepidation. As any New Yorker knows, living space is at an all-time premium in the city. To make matters worse, New York has far fewer hotel rooms, for its size, than Los Angeles, San Francisco or Miami, so the laws of supply and demand operate with a bloodless precision that would warm the heart of Adam Smith. Setting myself an upper limit of $125, without taxes, for a night's stay ($25 more than I would budget for hotels in any other U.S. city), I envisioned bleak nights in sour, minuscule rooms with peeling wallpaper, ventilated only by air shafts.

The good news is that there was not a single moment during my overnight stays in five New York hotels when I wondered if the man in the next room was Ray Milland having a lost weekend. Instead, I rubbed elbows with young London tourists, Argentine tango dancers, large French families and touring jazz musicians. There have always been tourists who come to New York City with more style than money, and I discovered that an increasing number of hotels are aiming their sights at this market, offering no-frills rooms with a touch of panache -- and sometimes more.

The bad news is that ''no frills'' means exactly that. In only one of the hotels I visited did a bellhop appear and offer to take my bags. Room service consisted of a takeout Chinese or coffee shop menu next to the Gideon Bible in the drawer of the nightstand. While most of the hotels had tourism brochures in the lobby, I saw a concierge in only one (the Wolcott), and only part time.

Finally, there's this discouraging reality: in New York City, ''cheap'' means at least $99 a night. Below that price, you can pretty well forget about getting a room with a private bath. (For purposes of this article, I limited my search to rooms-with-bathrooms, and to hotels with at least 40 rooms, rather than hostels or small B & B's.) And to stay within that $99-to-$125 price range I had to do some advance work, because only one of the hotels I stayed at (the Cosmopolitan) offered a room to walk-in customers for under $125. To get my price elsewhere I checked guidebooks, consulted my local grapevine and walked the streets to familiarize myself with as many budget Manhattan hotels as possible. Then I went on line to search for discounted rates at my target hotels on several reservation Websites that specialize in cut rate deals. This usually got me a 20 to 25 percent off the rates.

I booked my $125 room at the On the Ave hotel through one of these services, www.travelscape.com. It works like this: you go to the Web page, and fill out a form that asks what city you want to stay in and on what dates, and after a minute or two up pops a list of hotels available for those nights and the prices, which range from luxury hotels to cheapies. You choose a hotel, enter your name and credit card number, and pay Travelscape in advance; the company send you a confirmation by e-mail. The reservation can generally be changed up to 72 hours in advance for a $10 fee; after that point you forfeit the first night's charge.

When I arrived at the front desk of On the Ave, on Broadway and 77th Street on the Upper West Side, I handed the clerk a printout of the Travelscape e-mail confirmation and she handed me the plastic computerized keycard to Room 916. Out of curiosity, I asked about the rack rate, or published price.

Her answer was vague. Hoteliers are reluctant to quote a fixed room rate, because they vary depending on the season, the week and even the time of day. ''Well, it depends,'' she said. ''Today it would be $165.''

My delight at having secured almost a 25 percent discount was doubled when I walked into a large, bright, high-ceilinged room with a big window overlooking Broadway. The tiny lobby had prepared me for a spartan cubicle. Instead, the space was not only big by Manhattan standards -- about 20 by 16 feet -- but it actually bore traces of an interior designer's hand. A queen bed appeared to float on a Japanese-type wooden platform with a wooden canopy. Inside the bathroom gleamed with a futuristic matte-chrome sink and mirror -- a knockoff of Philippe Starck, yes, but well-executed. The bathroom was stocked with designer shampoos and soap, and two fluffy bathrobes. There was a gleaming, glass-enclosed shower and tub (the shower had a pulsing head).

It was a terrific room for the price, and the skeptic in me began to search for the catch. There were a few, though none was serious. On the Ave, which is being developed by a group specializing in stylish budget hotels (it also owns the Habitat, on West 57th Street) is still under construction. The floor I stayed on was complete, but workers renovating the floors below were constantly using the hotel's two small elevators. (There are three now.) Still, I couldn't hear any noise through the sturdy walls of the prewar building or the heavy, double-hung windows.

The other catch was location. The Upper West Side, a safe, pleasant residential neighborhood, is somewhat removed from the New York pizazz of trendy restaurants, night life, and theater. (The nearest subway is the often crowded IRT No. 1 local, two blocks away.) But if you're visiting New York to go to uptown museums and attend Lincoln Center, On the Ave is a perfect home base. And it is perfectly positioned for a classic New York breakfast -- I rolled out of bed in the morning and walked three blocks up Broadway for a takeout coffee and bagel from the cafe at Zabar's, the food mecca.

I next searched for an inexpensive hotel downtown. A friend had recently stayed at the Pioneer Hotel, a budget place on Broome Street and the Bowery, at the edge of SoHo, and pronounced it ''O.K. for the price.'' I phoned to reserve a room ($99 with a private bath), and went over to check it out. Up at the top of a long narrow flight of stairs, I turned left to find a barred window covered with bulletproof Plexiglas and adorned with a hand-lettered sign: ''Welcome to your home in New York.'' Three Swiss women with backpacks stood in front of the partition, vociferously complaining about their room and asking to switch.

Thus forewarned, I asked if I could see the room I'd be staying in before checking in. Reluctantly, the clerk complied and sent his assistant with a key -- a regular one, not a computerized card. When she opened a thin wooden door that was almost directly off the busy lobby, and I saw the dark grim room with a saggy double bed, I decided to look elsewhere.

Trendy and desirable, the downtown neighborhoods of SoHo, NoLIta (North of Little Italy) and TriBeCa have fewer hotels than other parts of Manhattan -- and almost none I could afford. I had high hopes for the Holiday Inn Downtown, on Lafayette Street, but it has been recently renovated, and rates start around $250. Only the Cosmopolitan, a recently redone hotel at the corner of West Broadway and Chambers Street, fell within my limits, at $109 a night for a single.

Room 423, smallish, dark and poorly ventilated (it faced an air shaft), fullfilled my deepest Motel 6 fantasies. The modern bathroom had cheap fixtures and industrial-grade packets of soap, scratchy towels and a noisy fan that rumbled on every time I switched on the light. Decor consisted of a big Toulouse-Lautrec print on one wall and a bizarre, upsetting canvas containing a magenta inkblot on another. Corridor noise seeped easily and often (the hotel was full) through the paper-thin walls. On the plus side, the double bed was comfy, the room was clean, and in the morning I treated myself to a full breakfast ($9.95) at the cafe of the trendy Bouley Bakery nearby, which served the best blueberry muffin I've ever tasted.

Giving up on downtown, I turned my attention to midtown, in the 30's and 40's. This area is ground zero for the new wave of budget hotels, since it contains many sturdy old places that fell into disrepair in the 70's and 80's. Because of New York's economic and tourism boom, these once-grandes dames are regaining some luster. Walking into the giddy, ornate plaster-and-marble ornamented lobby of the Beaux-Arts Wolcott Hotel, on 31st Street near Fifth Avenue, I fooled myself for an instant, thinking that I'd returned to the elegant New York of 1910, although the Japanese punksters and Russian tourists pushing enormous wheeled suitcases up to the bare-bones modern reception desk spoiled that fantasy somewhat.

AN excruciatingly slow elevator ride took me up to my corner room, 1203, which measured a quite decent size, about 14 by 10 feet, and had two windows. I dropped my bag in the enormous walk-in closet, while clucking disapprovingly at the forgettable decor: a ho-hum dark green bedspread over the queen bed, mahogany faux-Federalist furniture, and striped wallpaper. Then I happened to glance out one of the windows and saw that it had a fantastic front-row view of the Empire State Building, just three blocks away.

The bathroom was newly renovated, with a shower and a tiny bathtub. Amenities included an in-room computerized safe (the door lock was also modern and computerized), and a small fitness room on the mezzanine with two treadmills, a step machine and stationery bike. By mak ing my reservation through www .hoteldiscounts.com, a service of the Hotel Reservations Network, I'd gotten this spacious, clean room with a view for the same cost as the dingy closet at the Pioneer: $99.

Like the Wolcott, the New Yorker Ramada Plaza is another fabulous vintage building in the 30's (Eighth Avenue between 34th and 35th, near Madison Square Garden) with a dodgy recent past. In the 80's, this Art Deco skyscraper with more than 1,000 rooms served as the headquarters and dormitory for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. The hotel has been extensively renovated over the past two years, became a Ramada a few months ago and is trying to attract budget conventioneers (it's not far from the Javits Center) and tour groups.

The lobby bustled with hundreds of guests, and a long waiting line cordoned off by little ropes made it feel like an airport. But the receptionist was extremely friendly, and handed me a computer key to a room, 3210, only eight floors from the top. Figuring I was sure to get a decent view, I became quite giddy when I pulled open the curtains to behold a panorama that extended from Madison Square Garden to the Empire State Building to the Chrysler Building. It was the kind of view that makes you want to phone your 50 closest friends and throw a cocktail party.

Clean, reasonably sized, and with a lovely vintage tiled prewar bathroom, my room at the New Yorker was a super deal at the price I was able to snag that weeknight through www.hotres.com: $99 a night. The hotel also has a fitness room with rowing machines, weights, bicycles and stairclimbers. Drawbacks: some nighttime street noise (the windows could use more insulation), the crowded-airport feel of the lobby, and the less-than-charming neighborhood. In the morning I scurried to Starbucks across the street for breakfast, grabbed coffee and a muffin and went back to my room: Eighth Avenue looks a lot better from 32 stories above.

Friends had recommended the Mayfair New York Hotel on West 49th Street in the theater district as a charming, European-flavored small hotel. The cheapest price quote I could get on the phone was $145. However, as I was trolling the Hotel Reservations Network site, the Mayfair came up on the screen -- for $119.95 a night. I quickly reserved a single.

The Mayfair was indeed cute. The reservations desk shares space with a small, clubby bar-restaurant (the Garrick) in a wood-paneled lobby hung with vintage photographs of famous actors. The restaurant is busy right before theater time, and one must negotiate through the tables and waiters to reach the elevator, which I found somewhat inconvenient.

My room, 510, was typical of what I'd encountered traveling on the cheap in London -- the size of a breadbox, but brightened by a cheerful pink calico bedspread and intelligent use of space. A wall mirror compensated somewhat for the window facing an air shaft, and I liked the custom-built armoire, tucked barely inches from the foot of the double bed, which housed a TV and rollaway desk (a modem outlet was within reach). The bathroom was new, with gleaming white and black tile and a big, well-lighted mirror.

Still, it was a bit claustrophobic, a place made for sleeping, not hanging out. So I stowed my gear in the tiny closet and walked back out to 49th Street, where theater marquees beckoned enticingly from every corner. I realized that by staying so cheaply in New York, I could afford to buy a ticket for any of them. Maybe even two.

The bottom line

I spent between $99 and $125 a night, plus tax of 13.25 percent and $2 a night, in five New York hotels during March and April. To get these prices, which are generally lower than the hotels' ''rack'' or published rates, I chose hotels whose prices were already at the bottom of the range for the Manhattan market. I then booked most of my stays through one of several hotel discount services on the Internet: www

I found the HotRes software the most useful; its display shows you graphically a block of 12 days around the date selected and the rates for each day. However, it offered a smaller range of budget hotels from which to choose than the others.

There is no surcharge for using the Internet services, but you must to pay for the room in advance with a credit card number (either sent over the Internet or phoned in to a representative of the company). Pay attention to fees for cancellations and changes; depending on the service and when the change is made, they range from $10 to one night's rate.

Rack rates, quoted in early May, are for one or two people in a room unless noted otherwise.

On the Ave Hotel, 2178 Broadway at 77th Street, (212) 362-1100, fax (212) 787-9521. I booked this room for $125 through Travelscape.com in March. Current rack rate, $145.